Various example embodiments of the inventive concepts described herein relate to an image processing device including a vision sensor, an image processing system, an image processing method, and/or non-transitory computer readable medium including instructions related to an image processing method, and more particularly, an image processing device configured to regenerate a timestamp of an event occurring at a bad pixel.
In general, an image sensor may be classified as either an image sensor operating asynchronously or an image sensor operating synchronously. The image sensor operating synchronously is, for example, a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor. The image sensor operating asynchronously is, for example, a vision sensor such as a dynamic vision sensor.
The CMOS image sensor processes a frame-based image. For this reason, frames may be generated consistently at regular intervals (or periodically). In this case, since information about a portion that is not of interest to a user (e.g., the background or the like) is also generated consistently at regular intervals, the amount of data that a processor processes may sharply increase. This may cause a reduction in the performance of an image processing device.
In contrast, the vision sensor processes an event-based image. “Event-based” may mean that information about an event (e.g., a change in intensity of light, etc.) is generated and is provided to a user as soon as the event occurs, and data is not generated at regular intervals. Since the change in intensity of light occurs mainly at an outline of an object, unnecessary information (for example, information about a background) is not generated in the vision sensor. Accordingly, the amount of data that a processor processes may sharply decrease.
Meanwhile, a pixel size of the vision sensor is considerably larger than a pixel size of a conventional image sensor such as a CMOS image sensor. In the case where the pixels of the vision sensor themselves are problematic, the yield for a manufacturing process of the vision sensor as well as the quality of an image provided to the user by a vision sensor may be affected. However, since it is limited to improve the yield only through improvement of the manufacturing process of the vision sensor, there is a need to solve an issue due to bad pixels of the vision sensor by using hardware and/or software (e.g., firmware, etc.).